Why we call ourselves feminists—and are proud of it

I think I have probably always been an inadvertent feminist. It hasn’t really been an issue that impacted my day-to-day life though, so I never gave it much thought…until I had a daughter.

When we had Estelle, we suddenly noticed and became more offended by the use of the word b*tch on TV, which seems to be used constantly. (It’s like a red Volvo; once you look for it, you see it everywhere.) We try to steer her away from shows or movies that depict the need for a prince or other man to “save” the girl. While there has been some controversy around whether or not the movie “Frozen” really has a feminist theme or not (we’ll leave that point to Mayim Bialik to argue), Estelle does see it as Anna and Elsa being the heroines, and we love that she has that image to view at such a young age.

We actively try to reinforce that Estelle is smart because we kept reading that girls are told they are pretty, while boys are told they are smart. In our house, Estelle will have the same opportunities and rules as Winston. We will do our best to make sure the world around them follows suit.

In the words of Stephen Sondheim from the musical Into the Woods, “Careful the things you say, children will listen. Careful the things you do, children will see and learn.”

We are always learning from Estelle. For example, this day we learned a unicorn hat goes with anything.

Even small things leave an imprint on a child, as I learned when Estelle was showing me around her classroom at school one day when I was picking her up. There was a picture of a little boy running next to a picture of a little girl running. Estelle looked up at me and said, “Boys run fast, but girls run slow.” That was what the pictures showed, so I was proud that she could get that from the pictures. But I was sad that she thought girls were automatically inferior to boys.

I told her that some girls run really fast and some boys run really slow. “Girls can run just as fast as boys though. Don’t ever think that a boy can do anything that you can’t do,” I tried to reinforce for her. She looked sort of confused but said, “OK” and moved on to show me the next thing.

I know it is weird, but it reminds me of a riddle from “All in the Family” that fittingly aired the same year I was born.

A young boy and his father were in a car accident. Both were injured and rushed to the hospital. They were wheeled into separate operating rooms and two doctors prepped up to work on them, one doctor for each patient. The doctor operating on the father got started right away, but the doctor assigned to the young boy stared at him in surprise. “I can´t operate on him!” the doctor exclaimed to the staff, “That child is my son!” How can that be?

The answer that the doctor was the boy’s mother may seem obvious in today’s world with so many female doctors, but in 1973 it was somewhat groundbreaking. Granted, if you Google the riddle today, you actually get a lot of people saying, “Well, obviously the boy has two dads!” Again, times really have changed.

Emma Watson, best known as Hermione Granger from the “Harry Potter” movies, gave an amazing speech to the United Nations earlier this week about feminism and gender equality. We encourage you to watch it if you have 14 minutes, especially if you have a daughter.

Count us among the first to enthusiastically join her campaign…for our daughter AND sons and all the other daughters and sons out there.